


Your Heart, a Garden

by thecaryatid



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/M, Female My Unit | Byleth, Flowers, Fluff, Gardening, Nagamas 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-02-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:33:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22958731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecaryatid/pseuds/thecaryatid
Summary: Dedue tries to find Byleth's favorite flower.
Relationships: Dedue Molinaro/My Unit | Byleth
Comments: 16
Kudos: 94
Collections: Nagamas Gifts





	Your Heart, a Garden

**Author's Note:**

> A very late Nagamas gift for poly-drawz, based on the prompt byleth/Dedue fluff at the greenhouse. I hope you like it!

The professor always seems to be there. 

Once the greenhouse was something of a haven for Dedue, a place most of the students didn’t bother to come, full of greenery and life and absolutely nothing else. No professors to eye him like they’re deciding whether to challenge the prince over his continued presence, no Faerghan students to try to draw him into some drawn-out argument, no others to look at him with fear or pity. 

Except Professor Byleth is there now. She’s been coming to the greenhouse every day for the last few weeks, whenever there’s time to spare. 

Dedue greets her. It’s only polite. She nods back, makes some inquiry about one of the plants he’s working with. Flat as ever, but perhaps the glimmers of interest in her eyes are genuine. He answers - it’s the least he can do. Dedue tells her about the fields of flowers he recalls from his childhood, and perhaps that will be the end of it. 

That is not the end of it. Byleth is there again and again. Dedue is coaxed into conversation again and again, not unwilling per se but unfamiliar and unused to it, and Byleth hangs onto his every word as though he’s the most scintillating conversationalist in the land. 

It becomes a tradition, even in the heart of war. Byleth returns to the greenhouse over and over, loitering among the fragrant flowers, collecting violets and lilies and scattering them among the men and women she’s never stopped trying to take care of. 

“I have talked about myself more than I am used to,” Dedue says as Byleth tries her best to coax him into another long story about one of the flowers. Well, long by Dedue’s standards, so perhaps three complete sentences of recollection. 

Byleth tilts her head, saying nothing. 

“Do you have a favorite flower? Or some favorite plant?” Dedue asks. She talks so little about herself, always content to draw others into relieving their troubles into her waiting arms. 

“A favorite plant?” She frowns, thoughtful. “My father taught me which wild plants are good for food and medicine, but nothing about flowers. Aren’t they all beautiful?” 

“They are. And a favorite plant need not be a flower. A favorite tree you remember climbing, or even a favorite cooking herb. What speaks to you?” 

“Which plant speaks to me? I don’t know, Dedue. I’ve never thought of plants in terms of my own tastes.” 

“How very like you,” Dedue says, “regarding them only as practical things or gifts for others. You grow many of your former students their favorite flowers, do you not? It may be time to find yours.” 

“I couldn’t,” Byleth says, arguing as she does against anything meant to be solely hers. “It’s enough that my friends are happy.” 

Happy may be a stretch, during a war, during such bleak circumstances, while Dedue’s king still sometimes lingers in the shadows of a ruined cathedral. But even Dedue must take a few minutes for himself, an hour or two every week to cook and garden and feed the not-insubstantial part of his heart that wishes only for peace to come as soon as it may. 

“Consider it a favor to me,” Dedue says. “I would like to find your favorite flower. You should know what comfort comes from such a thing.” 

Byleth stares inscrutable and nods, once, as though she doesn’t know how to respond to a thoughtful gift offered. 

* * *

The first few are failures. None of the flowers grown customarily in the greenhouse fit, or Byleth would already know. Still, he hands her a bouquet of lily-of-the-valley and violets next time she visits, since he hasn’t had the time to grow anything new. 

She smiles the slightest bit at the first bouquet, but only in the way people do when receiving presents that are nice but not loved. Dedue resolves to do better. 

Flower seeds are not a common commodity in war but Dedue already has quite a collection, and when they travel there’s frequently the opportunity to find new samples. It’s a tradition he should have started earlier, easing the pain of each battle with a half hour spent in some nearby wood looking for whatever growing things they don’t have at Garreg Mach. 

His first real try is forsythia, delicate bright flowers on long, graceful branches, fit to fill a room with their cheery golden color and sweet scent. The greenhouse went untended for so long that there's more than enough space to plant new flowers where the older, delicate ones had died, and Dedue presents her with a whole branch of their proud new forsythia bush after the next battle. 

Byleth’s smile is wider. “They’re lovely,” she says, and must mean it. But it isn’t quite right. 

“You do not love them,” Dedue says, just to confirm. Byleth’s smile fades. 

“No. but they’ll still brighten up my room. Thank you, Dedue. People don’t usually give me flowers.” 

“Of course. We have all become used to you looking after us, we forget to offer you the same comforts.” 

He tries dutchman’s breeches next, opting for the strange and surprising instead of the everyday blossoms sold still by merchants and exchanged on holidays. 

Byleth laughs out loud at the bouquet of silky little blooms, tiny and dangling down from curled green stems, a forest of elaborately laced laundry hanging in the wind. It’s a small victory that Dedue allows to warm his own heart and curl his own mouth in a reserved smile. Mirth is not an emotion Byleth displays often, but still, they are not quite right. 

“They bring you joy,” he says. 

“Yes,” Byleth says, holding one of the flowers up to the bright glass roof, examining it from every angle. “Are these magic? Or do they really grow that way?” 

“I am not an authority on which plants were created by magic, but these ones were grown right here, in mundane soil. You like them, but they are not perfect.” A favorite flower should bring more than mirth. It should bring tenderness and fondness, memory and thought. 

“They are not,” Byleth says, “but I love them. Can you grow more? Could I grow more?” 

“I imagine they will make good gifts,” Dedue says, summoning the image of Annette’s delighted gasp at receiving such whimsical flowers, contrasting it against Felix’s confused glower. “I would be happy to give you the seeds.” 

He starts a list. Every month brings two or three new flowers, chosen by fragrance or beauty or happenstance. 

Ghost pipe, found in a swampy forest after a particularly bad fight and beyond even Dedue’s skills to propagate. Byleth squints at it in confusion, stroking the petaled flutes drooping off the knobbly, pale stem. A mistake, perhaps. Dedue had thought of her hair and the delicate green of her eyes when he’d looked at the thin, translucent material of the flower, had thought of Byleth’s wildness when contemplating the tree roots it latches onto to grow. But it’s too ghostly, too dead-seeming even when full of life. 

Morning glories, grown in a garden box on Dedue’s own window, bright and purple with little starbursts of pink in the middle of each trumpet-like petal. They’re soft and captivating, bright and simple to grow, twining up the window shutters until he coaxes the vines onto a wood lattice instead. Byleth smiles when he hands her the whole pot. 

“They were a good choice,” Dedue observes. 

“They were. You’re filling my room with so many beautiful things,” Byleth says, holding his eyes with that intense stare, even though she practically has to crane her head back to look up at him. 

“Someone must.” 

Lavender’s next. Byleth, Dedue swears, giggles when he hands her a handful of stems with a few of the leafs torn to release their fragrance, so familiar from recipes that he himself has made. It isn’t the most spectacular cultivar, little more than green twigs with sparse, dull purple blooms. Byleth is delighted, all the same. 

Together they plant pansies, already grown and harvested from a nearby field that’s gone dead and fallow save for the scattering of velvet-plush flowers peeking out between the tall grasses. Dedue carefully digs up each one with three precise cuts of a trowel, lays them side by side in a basket woven carefully tight to keep the precious soil from scattering on the way back to the monastery. 

Byleth is waiting in the greenhouse. Her eyes brighten at his burden, and she steps over to carefully lift one of the pansies before he even has the chance to rest the basket on the ground. The one she scoops up is burnt orange and bright blue, bold colors that some intrepid farmer must have labored to create in the same flower. 

“Should we plant them next to the forsythia?” Byleth asks, suggesting and simultaneously bowing to Dedue’s expertise. 

“We should,” Dedue says. They kneel together, shoulders nearly brushing, Byleth making neat scoop after scoop in the soil and Dedue laying one bundle of roots down in each. They take turns brushing the rich dirt back over each seedling until there are three careful rows, black on purple, red on gold, green and orange and every color found in nature, semicircling the base of the forsythia. They look so out of place next to the relatively wild growth of the rest of the greenhouse. 

“The plants will spread,” Dedue informs Byleth. “They will fill the space they have been given, and will not look so sparse for long.” 

“Good,” Byleth smiles back at him. “I never doubted your knowledge, Dedue, and they are already beautiful.” 

But still, they are not quite right. A favorite flower should contain as much emotion as a favorite poem, a favorite food, a favorite painting. He has brought Byleth so many flowers, shared his love of the gardens until she’s reveled in it as well, but something is missing. 

Hydrangeas don’t manage it, cheery fireworks of compact petals. Too common, Dedue thinks. Orchids prompt a smile smaller than he’s seen since the ghost pipes - too rare and finicky. He grows plant after plant, flower after flower, and Byleth thanks him for each one, and perhaps that’s all it will be. 

* * *

They’re preparing to march on Enbarr in only weeks when there’s a commotion outside Dedue’s door, a rush of running feet and laughter. He expects to see Annette and Ashe, or perhaps even Manuela when he opens it to investigate. He does not expect Byleth laughing and scuffed with mud, arms full of bright yellow and leaf green and the scent of fresh growth. 

He looks closer. They’re familiar. “Byleth,” Dedue says. “These are -” 

“Dandelions, Dedue!” She looks so pleased with herself and her armful of weeds, some cut off at the stem and some with dirt still clinging to the roots. But Byleth is grinning and luminous, and it’s perhaps a disappointment that he was not the one to find her favorite flower, but it’s nonetheless a triumph. 

“An interesting choice,” he says. 

She laughs again. “I know, they’re too common. But they grow everywhere, even in the mud and blood of a battlefield. I know I've been seeing them for my whole life, but I had never really looked at them.”

It makes a certain sort of sense. “The leaves are edible. The blooms are bright.” 

“And soft,” Byleth says, rubbing one of the flowers against her cheek, leaving behind a yellow smear of pollen. “I know we can’t plant them in the greenhouse, but I’d like to keep some with me.” 

“A fitting choice,” Dedue says, smiling in unfamiliar softness. There are enough materials in Garreg Mach, it’s the work of a minute to find a small planter lying unused at the back of a shed and carry it with a bucket of soil to Byleth’s room. She accompanies him, cradling her prize of dandelions, immune to the weird glances she gets from those they pass. 

“They will be easy to care for,” Dedue says as he helps Byleth coax the roots of the still-living plants into the dirt and sprinkle seeds from the puffballs over them. “Water and some sunlight. They’ll take over the planter from just a few seeds.” 

“Thank you,” Byleth says. She brushes her hand over his, dirt-smeared and pollen-stained, mud under all their fingernails. 

Her cheek is still smeared with pollen. Dedue reaches up to brush it off, but the pollen only mingles with the dirt still sticking to his palm. 

Byleth laughs anyway, reaches up to cup his hand with her own. “We could start our own garden together, after the war,” she says, soft and serious. 

She’ll be busy. She’ll very likely be the new archbishop. Kneeling in the dirt planting flowers with Dedue is probably not fitting for her station. “We will,” he says instead, taking her other hand. “There is no end to the flowers I wish to grow with you.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Dedue's voice is hard. Byleth's voice is also hard. Hopefully they sound like themselves!


End file.
